Barbican Hall
Grime:
Virga
Prokofiev:
Violin Concerto no.2 in G
minor, op.63
Strauss:
Eine
Alpensinfonie, op.64
Leonidas Kavakos (violin)
London Symphony Orchestra
Daniel Harding (conductor)
A wonderful concert. Without
being didactic – nothing wrong with that, far from it – in its programming, it
permitted connections to be made, if one would, whilst concentrating on
performing and interpretative excellence. If I have heard better live
performances of either Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto or Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, then I must have
forgotten them. That seems unlikely.
First, in a programme that more
or less corresponded to the traditional, yet now quite rare,
overture-concerto-symphony format – it was actually never quite so ‘traditional’
as some like to claim – came Helen Grime’s Virga.
Commissioned by the LSO for its UBS Sound Adventures Scheme and first performed
more than ten years ago in 2007, Virga
takes its name, to quote John Fallas’s excellent programme note, from ‘precipitation
that falls from a cloud but evaporates before reaching the ground’. I do not
know whether you will believe me – I hope so, dear reader – but I thought of raindrops
whilst hearing the piece (for the first time), prior to reading the note
immediately afterwards. Indeed, I thought, almost saw, droplets falling or
travelling not so much in both as in many directions. Immediately, that is,
after an opening éclat which must surely have offered particular appeal to one
of the piece’s early advocates: no less than Pierre Boulez. The precision both
of work and performance under Daniel Harding would surely have appealed to him
too; it sounded not un-Gallic, and indeed not without a little Russianness
either. (I do not think it was just
the coming of Prokofiev that had me think that.) However, there was something
intriguingly Germanic, a little Germanic out-of-water perhaps, to an almost
Romantic cello melody, still more so its violin (Mahlerian?) successor, heard
without accompaniment. Messianesque tuned percussion incited a Boulezian sense
of controlled delirium – or, perhaps, rather the sense that such a state might
be around the corner. I mention other composers not because I found the music
in any sense derivative, quite the contrary. But just to place it, as I indeed
placed it for myself, when hearing it for the first time. Harding and the LSO
shaped it beautifully, but this was music, ‘poetic’ in a far from un-Romantic
sense, which permitted of such shaping. I very much look forward to hearing it
again – and indeed to the LSO’s new commission from the composer, to be heard
later this year, conducted by Simon Rattle.
The opening solo of the
Prokofiev concerto is surprisingly difficult to bring off. It needs to be
direct yet inviting, anything but fussy and yet – a frustratingly vague term, I
know – ‘expressive’. Those things it
certainly was in Leonidas Kavakos’s performance; it sounded the easiest thing
in the world, as deceptive and yet as necessary an impression as if the melody
were Mozart’s. Somehow, without my always being quite sure how, the orchestra
and conductor seemed always to complement Kavakos’s playing, as that did
theirs. This was clearly a meeting of minds and, I think, of souls too. There
was an unusual sense of the ‘Allegro’ as well as of the more common ‘moderato’
of the first movement’s tempo marking, greatly to its benefit. It was flexible,
yet directed: flexibly directed, one might say. There was darkness too, without
exaggeration: a world of fairy-tales, perhaps, yet we know how deep such tales
delve into our psyches, individual and collective. Dead-centred, whether in a
single line or double-stopping, Kavakos’s tone was surely a joy in itself, yet
there was no ‘in itself’ to it. His counterpoint blended perfectly with that of
the orchestra’s soloists, every one of them first-rate.
Egyptian cotton, rather than
silk, was my first thought concerning the soundworld of the slow movement,
often sentimentalised, yet not here. The pulsating ‘accompaniment’ did all that
could be asked of it and more; so did the hemiolas it helped create. Kavakos’s
vibrato, the length of his bowing, his fingering, all were perfectly chosen and
varied; and yet again, it sounded so easy. (It most certainly is not!) I think
I even preferred this to Heifetz. Music and performance alike proved soulful,
communicative, yet never narcissistic. Form, once again, was vividly, even
magically communicated by all. The finale, taken attacca, offered just the right degree of contrast: very much the
next and final chapter. It had – something about which I have been thinking
quite a bit recently – very much the character and dynamism of a finale. That
might sound a truism, but I do not think it is; it certainly did not seem so in
a performance of such distinction. And yet, it was very much the particularity
of this finale, castanets and all.
The side-slipping ‘simplicity’ of the third movement from the Sonata for Two
Violins, op.56, collegially given with LSO leader, Roman Simovic, made for the
perfect encore.
Richard Strauss’s music and
indeed his æsthetic seem to me all the more necessary by the day. His defence,
a musical defence, of art and of music in particular are just what a world,
descending further daily into abject barbarism, needs. And of course Strauss
knew very much about that – not just after 1933, but over the four-year period
of writing this symphony, 1911-15. The darkness, here visual as well as aural,
in which the symphony’s ‘Nacht’ opens is, or should be something very special:
materialist, yes, and with a Nietzschean spirituality born out of
anti-Christian materialism. So it was here. Harding’s way with the opening
material intrigued me greatly: more flowing than one often hears, Wagnerian
with its unendliche Melodie. I liked
it very much. What grew out of it was elemental, magnificent, yet never
pompous. It breathed the air of Strauss as much as of Garmisch; it spoke not
only of ‘Nature’ in the way that some think it does, pictorially. Nor was the
music unduly shoehorned into conceptions, often irrelevant, of what a symphony ‘should’
be. It made its own way, more a symphonic poem, perhaps, certainly sui generis: all the better for it.
Paths opened up – and closed – before one’s ears; this was a musical ascent,
not just a musical recreation of an ascent.
If I say that I found the
performance captivated me still more than one from Bernard
Haitink with this same orchestra several years ago, that should give an
indication of quite how highly I esteemed it. The LSO certainly sounded warmer,
or at least the Barbican acoustic did, and I do not think it was just that. For
‘symphonic’ need not, should not, imply a lack of attention to colour, of which
there was as much to appreciate here as in the pieces by Grime and Prokofiev. Fragments
from Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier – not literally from those works, but ‘as if’… -
dissolved before our aural imagination, just as they had in Verga. Indeed, that coupling came to seem all the more inspired in
retrospect. Then Die Frau ohne Schatten
came into earshot, above all progressions that might well have come from there –
even if, again, they did not. To put it another way, this was not just Strauss’s
Alpine Symphony; it was most
definitely Strauss.
Olivier Stankeiewicz’s oboe
solo, exquisitely moving, made me long to hear him in Strauss’s concerto for
that instrument. Indeed, at times, the composer’s ‘Indian summer’ did not sound
so distant. At other times, though, quite rightly, it seemed a world away;
there was a battle to be fought right here, right now. These are very
particular Straussian phantasmagoria here; so they sounded, relished yet
thoroughly integrated by Harding and his players. In the Epilogue – Karajan used
to say that he conducted the work only for this – everything mattered. Above
all, Strauss mattered – more than ever. The lamps were going out all over
Europe, across the world. I think we all knew or at least felt what Sir Edward
Grey (may have) said next. And yet, there was hope of a sort. For this work
offers the best of tests. You cannot really believe in Strauss if you do not
believe in it. (You cannot even really have listened to it, I should argue.) If
you do not believe in Strauss, can you really believe in music? At any rate, if
you do not believe in music, especially now, may God help you.
